Valentine's Day

When I was a kid, I thought you were really corny. You seem like a holiday invented by women so that men would spend their money on them. Once high school came around though, I started to wish I could experience you more. Now here I am. I am 34 years old and I can truly say I do not have one memorable Valentine's Day date in my life.

You bother me now. You bother a lot of people, to be honest. You show up every year, not too long after Christmas. You sell your rings and other jewelry on TV and I'm tired of getting all the emails from three different flower companies.

Don't get me wrong. It's not that I don't like love or that I want to avoid love. I love love; it's probably the best thing that can happen to a person. But somewhere along the way, I brought into this lie that says if I'm not in love, then I'm not really alive. I brought the lie that says if I love someone, but then they stopped loving me or if they started loving somebody else, then I must not have much worth or value.

If I continue to believe that lie, it's going to create such a level of inadequacy, create a hole in me so large, that nobody else could ever even begin to approach filling it. I've tried filling it with material things, with work, with food, with crushes, with drinks, with music, and none of it works.

I think there have been too many times in the last 20 years where I mixed up girls for God. It seems that I'm always my most comfortable when I have initial interest in a girl and begin to learn about her. That was the place I always seemed to have as a young man, and in reality, I haven't escaped it. Even though I am more confident person than I used to be, I have looked too much to women for validation of my self worth. But to think of the unfair pressure that must put on a girl. It's not fair to her. Lord knows no matter who I meet, she will have her own flaws and her own issues and her own baggage and I know I am not qualified to fix her up.

I'm sure in two weeks, I will be tempted to ignore you. It will be a Sunday without football, the week after the Super Bowl. I'm sure I will see one Facebook post after another about how wonderful love is and how some happy somebody is in their current relationship. And my first instinct will be to curse my fate and play a sad song about unrequited love.

You know what, I don't want to do that. There are so many other kinds of love that are so important in this world. I have a small family, but I have a family that cares about me. I have many acquaintances who care and a few friends, who I know really do care about me and are interested in how I'm doing. Just because I'm not taking a girl out to dinner, buying roses, and ending the night with a deep kiss on my lips, does not mean that I don't have self worth. It does not mean that my life cannot be meaningful, wonderful, and exciting.

I have placed too much importance on you and what you represent. I resolve to not do that anymore. It's not that I don't care. It's just that you don't own me.